Interview with Underground Documentary Filmmaker Bill Daniel
When did you first hop a train?
I hopped a freight in ’87 out of Houston. I was living in Galveston at the time. I actually tried to catch one out of Galveston, but a rail worker said, “What are you doing?” “I’m trying to get to California.” He said, “Get in the truck,” and he took me to Houston, like sixty miles up the road, took me to the yard and said, “These are the trains that go to California, sonny.”
Did he make that trip just for you?
He was driving into Houston anyway. He just saw me in the Galveston yard with my pack and said, “Sonny, I don’t know if you heard the news, but the trains don’t run here no more.”
He told me which part of the yard westbound trains were built in, so that saved me a lot of trouble there, but I
really didn’t know what I was doing. It was definitely beginner’s luck.
How much contact did you have with the people who are in [Who is Bozo Texino]? Did you pretty much go out and shoot and see them and talk to them and that was it?
Most of the tramps in the film I just ran into on the road. Ride with them for a while before bringing up the subject. “Oh hey, wanna be in my movie?” “Huh?” Some of the tramps I would run into again over the years. A few I’ve been able to keep up with. Grandpa’s pretty much my adopted grandfather now. He’s actually got a birthday coming up.
It’s a weird thing about documentaries in general, it’s so strangely possessive of people’s souls. The Native Americans had it right: you definitely capture someone’s soul in a photograph, and it’s even worse in a film and even worse in a documentary. You’re carrying around this bizarre psychic responsibility when you put somebody in a documentary. In a lot of documentaries, you keep a distance between you and the subject, and everybody you’re filming kind of implicitly signs onto this contract of the distance. Like a one-night stand; “We’ll be really intimate during the filming, then you’ll take it away and do whatever you want with it, and maybe I’ll see it or not.”